The wide expansive corridors had begun to smell damp and were narrowing claustrophobically as I followed Ray towards the staff car park. I’d been fortunate in that, unlike the public who were forced to park half a mile away and walk to the shop, the staff had the privilege of parking in the lower basement.
“But only if you get here early otherwise you’re proper stuffed,” Ray had been keen to point out.
“Number of times I’ve arrived for work then had to turn around and drive away,” Ray’s leg tap-tapped along at a reasonable pace and I’d noticed that it acted like a metronome. Whenever he spoke the rhythm of his words followed the beat perfectly and was encouraging the sleep in me so I was glad when he finally lapsed into silence and just walked.
Reaching the end of the corridor we stood in front of a service elevator. Ray leaned forward and slid the outer cage door, the diagonal bars folding flat, and carefully stepped inside. I waited for a moment as he adjusted himself into the tiny space, at first not quite sure if I would even fit in there with him and then turned around and reversed into the space.
“If you don’t shut the door then it won’t move,” Ray grunted, the force of his words blowing the hair on the back of my head.
I slid the cage door shut. This didn’t feel right, I didn’t trust any of these people and I was letting one of them take me down to a deserted car park in a building the police couldn’t get into even if we could call them.
Ray contorted his body, freeing his arm and putting it over my shoulder, readying himself to put me in a headlock. I moved backwards to avoid it and bumped into his Santa-gut as he reached even further forward, avoiding the headlock and instead pressing the ‘B2’ button on the panel to my right. He retracted his arm, folding it down by his side once more.
“You’re not my type,” he said then grimaced a smile at me. I raised my eyebrows and smiled back then the lift lurched into life and began to drop.
And when I say drop I do mean drop. My arms shot out to brace myself on its sides as a feeling rose in my stomach. A familiar feeling, but one I would usually only expect to feel if was on a roller coaster and certainly not in a plummeting metal cage.
I stared about me and tried not to think about it but everything about this contraption seemed designed to intimidate, from the cage door to the low ceiling to the metal sign screwed to the wall warning that no more than seven persons should be allowed in at one time. Since it was extremely unlikely that you could fit three people in this space without them becoming intimately acquainted with certain areas of one another’s anatomy, presumably the only way to fit seven in would be if they were dwarves and the lift was fitted with some sort seven-tier bunk bed affair.
With a snap the lift reached the bottom of the shaft, Ray and I were both lifted a few inches into the air and the lights of the lift went out. For a moment I thought it was the narcolepsy and then the light blinked back on and we dropped down and I shakily reached forward and slid the reluctant cage door open, stepping out into an unlit corridor.
“It always does that,” said Ray, walking out and flicking a collection of light switches on the wall next to the lift.
As the lights came on I could see that we were inside the car park itself and that it was practically empty. I suppose it was to be expected but for some reason I’d thought there would be a collection of cars in there. Instead there were just one or two around the edges and one blue van sitting alone in the very centre. I looked at Ray, he nodded and started walking towards it.
The van itself was nothing out of the ordinary, exactly what you would expect of a security guard I suppose. Over ten years old, bits of rust here and there and once Ray opened it up the inside was much the same. It was clean. Very clean. But scruffy from a decade of heavy use and Jacob seemed to have an obsession with air fresheners, with ten or more hanging from the partition that separated the cabin of the van from the back.
“So what made you think there might be something here?” I shouted out to Ray as I took a bunch of papers from the compartment in the door.
“Dunno,” he walked in front of the car so I could see him from where I sat in the driver’s seat. “You said about taxidermy so…”
There was nothing of any interest in the papers, just junk. I leaned over and opened the glove compartment but all it contained, strangely, was a pair of gloves. I took them out and mused briefly on the fact that Jacob may be the only person I’d ever met who actually used his glove compartment for gloves. If you could call them gloves, they were more gauntlets of protective type workmen might wear. I threw them back, got out of the car and wandered around the back.
“So have you worked here long?” I said, opening the doors at the back of the van to reveal… not much.
“Six years, maybe seven,” I heard Ray clack-clacking around the van as I climbed inside. “But it doesn’t pay well.”
“No?” I hunched over so I could walk around inside the van, again getting paranoid that he might just lock me in here I decided to make this a very quick check.
“No,” he replied. “It’s difficult to make ends meet so I do a bit of moonlighting.”
And then I saw it. It stood out because you didn’t usually expect to see a fossil amongst the newspapers and cardboard boxes. At least, that’s what it looked like.
“Moonlighting?” I asked, not really listening as I reached forward and picked up the strange object.
“Yeah. Just as a cleaner, same as here.”
“Mmmm,” once the object was in my hand it was clear that I had been wrong, this wasn’t a fossil. It was a claw. A bloody enormous claw that was maybe three inches long from the horrendously sharp tip to the part where it had become detached. I shoved it in my pocket and scrambled out of the van in time to see Erin bearing down on Ray.
“I knew it!” Erin’s nasal voice echoed irritatingly around the empty car park.
“Hey, hang on a minute,” said Ray. “What are you doing down here?”
“Came to get you two, something weird’s going on but that’s beside the point, did I hear correctly? Did Ray say that he was working two jobs?”
Ray inhaled to answer but apparently wasn’t going to be given the chance as Erin just kept stamping towards him.
“You know what that means, don’t you Ray? It means that when I tell the management you will finally be sacked you lazy little man.”
I slammed the doors of the van.
“You were mistaken,” I said. “He said no such thing, did you Ray?”
“Well…” he replied.
“We were talking about someone else. Now please, Erin, why don’t you take the elevator with Ray? I’ll take the stairs and see you up there.”
Erin huffed then turned around and stomped towards the metal cage. There was no way I was going back inside that to play sardines with the two of them.
“Come on,” I said to Ray.
“Thanks,” he put his hand out and shook mine. “You didn’t have to do that. Thanks.”
I shrugged, “Come on. I need to talk to Jacob.”
~*~
